All tracks written, performed, and recorded by Bernard P. Provencher LeVautour, at various points between 2000 and 2010, in a vast assortment of locations, with equipment running the gamut between cassette-tapes and Pro-Tools.

Think of this record as a sort of scrapbook, sketch-pad, or notebook, constructed with sound. The impetus for all of these tracks is literary, and usually stems from LeVautour’s attempts, as a writer and literary scholar who happens to conceptualize aurally, to wrap his head around certain ideas, settings, characters, themes, etc. in his writing.

{change the narrative-perspective. this third-person-omniscient feels very fake.}

Very little of this content is in any way “personal,” in terms of content, but nearly all involved my attempts to make my artistic-output more deeply “personal” to me, to become more emotionally involved in, and mentally connected to, the content itself.... because music is almost always my tool for doing so.

“Physical Consent,” for instance, began as my attempt, while writing a piece of short fiction, to construct the record being spun by the DJ at a gallery-party... eventually also incorporating lyrically the thoughts going through a character in that piece’s mind while being, arguably, raped by a woman at that party.

“Domicile” features an attempt to understand a character in a smothering domestic situation that I, at the time, had no personal knowledge of at all.

I honestly can’t recall exactly what “Explode the Shattered Silence” was about, but I think it had something to do with an academic idea that involved some sort of mashup of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and contemporary dance-club culture.

“Metamorphoses” is perhaps the most personal song on the record, but even that one’s deeply connected to my academic/ writers-life, a hodge-podge of sounds collected in brief moments of down-time over the course of an entire grad-school semester, dealing with themes of identity-construction that had much to do with topics I was researching and writing on at the time, mashed into mantra-like vague reflections on certain aspects of my personal-life.

The story behind “The Fisherman of Gloucester” is two-fold- Initially, the song stemmed from a hundred-year-old magazine article I had stumbled on about the plight of fishermen and their families in a small New England village that I was considering fictionalizing. It also sprung from a drunken conversation with fellow members of the original version of the Asbjorn Poetry and Arts Collective about how a dance-move I had just invented, “the robot-jig,” had no appropriate music to be tested to.

I wrote “The Dancefloor Democratic” for an undergraduate Literature class, as part of an attempt to relate to Walt Whitman as a performance-artist and “man of the crowd.” “Symphonies and Dorian Dreams” is kind of an inside-joke with myself. It could, and has been, passed off as a love-song... but it’s really a stream of mangled Oscar Wilde-isms that I was toying with and ironically repurposing. {shhhhh.... don’t tell.}

“The Dog Licks; The Ugly Dog” is another one about a fictional character I was trying to understand better, an aging woman living alone in a secluded house, with an obsession with her pet-companion that borders on {ok, is} uncomfortable.

“Innisfree” was a challenge from an undergraduate class-mate. She sent me the audio of Yeats-reading-Yeats, with the provocative “OK, remix THIS.” I love those sort of challenges.

As part of the process of writing a piece of flash-fiction, I needed to know and understand what happened directly AFTER the segment covered in the story... which abruptly stops right before the conversation in “Blood Brick Confessional” begins.

“Never Be Alone” is a cheesy Poe-ism that’s been haunting me for a while {bad pun, I know}. It was written with Ad Bacculum, a goofy death-metal side-project of one of my old bands, as our token spooky power-ballad. I’ve repurposed this one many times, because it’s fun, and ridiculous.

The remaining three tracks are “bonus tracks”... The versions of “New Girl” and “Nightmare” here are my remixes of songs by a metal band I used to play with called Ashes of Frost. “Amidst The Darkness Plague” is the oldest song on this record... and included as a sort of homage to all of the old, unreleased, and lost “lock myself in the studio and make a{n experimental} record {that no one but me wants to hear}” albums, by other solo-acts that worked under titles like ExoNixAgris, Gamen, etc... that led up to and informed the material included in this collection.


Some thank you’s... Dan Adhesiveslipper McDermott and everyone at Headhat records for your interest in letting people hear this thing (and convincing me to finally call it done)... Ross Boyd, Matt Affannato, Wes Lopez, Sadi Khan, The Tuna Fish Discrepancy, Pull Trouble From the Fire, The Green Sea, etc. for bugging me enough to light a musical fire under my ass at a time when I really needed it, to stop considering myself a “former” musician and get back involved {and acknowledge the healthy hybridity of my work in various mediums, that finally releasing this thing is kind of emblematic of}... Linda Zygutus, Eric Wertheimer, Rachel Trubowitz, Krista Turner, Ashes of Frost, Macalastair Ming, various members of my family, a ton of dead authors, critics, etc for inspiring content in various exciting ways... and to most of the people that I sample, riff on, and borrow lines and concepts from for being long-dead and thus unlikely to complain too much. {and everyone I forgot. Next time... I’ll thank you for bugging me to make sure there IS a next time.}


“The musical problem of the machinery of the voice necesarily implies the abolition of the overall dualism machine.” -Deleuze and Guattari, “Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Intense: Becoming Music,” A Thousand Plateaus.